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Crisp 3,271

Yesterday in the forums somebody asked if we received Intel review guidelines from Intel for the Ryzen review as well. A very curious question, I answered no. And if they did we simply never use them as we do things our own way (as we always do).

They question itself was already curious but if we dive deeper into the story we see the claims have been made by Semi-Accurate, not the most unbiased source. Then again, we see no reason for them to make this stuff up. Also some other press apparently received that email. So yes, as it seems Intel has been reaching out to certain media in shameless attempt to influence upcoming benchmark scores in their favor. Intel's PR department is contacting media and calling in favors with the press by issuing them "guidelines" on how to review AMD Ryzen. Intel's PR emails include this line: "call us before you write."

This is the story of the day for sure. It is going to be a rough week for Intel, that's for sure. But if true, come on Intel, really?

Intel underwent several investigations by international regulatory bodies that resulted in fines and/or other penalties. The last of which amounted to $1.4 billion dollars. Which Intel had to pay as recently as 2014. But, only after losing its final challenge to the decision which it dragged in EU courts for nearly a decade.

“The Commission demonstrated to the requisite legal standard that Intel attempted to conceal the anti-competitive nature of its practices and implemented a long term comprehensive strategy to foreclose AMD from the strategically most important sales channels,” the court said in a near 300-page decision.

The findings of the EU Commision’s investigation concluded that :
A full point by point list can be found on reuters.

Intel provided monetary incentives in the form of hidden rebates to Acer, Dell & HP on condition that they bought all, or almost all, their x86 CPUs from Intel for three years and none or, almost none, from AMD.

Intel provided hidden rebates to Lenovo on condition that it purchases its CPU needs for its notebook computers exclusively from Intel.

Intel made direct payments to a major retailer on condition it stocked only computers with its CPUs

Intel paid computer manufacturers to halt or delay the launch of AMD hardware, including Dell, Acer, Lenovo, and NEC.

In 2010 Intel settled an investigation by the FTC for $1.25 billion paid to AMD.

Jon Leibowitz, Chairman of the FTC stated : “We believe Intel stepped well over the line of aggressive competition on the merits, and engaged in unfair, deceptive and anti-competitive conduct. The sum total of all this anti-competitive conduct unfairly prevented companies from competing, bolstered Intel’s monopoly, and harmed consumers by stunting innovation, diminishing quality, and keeping prices higher than they would otherwise be.”

The FTC’s findings :

The usual complaints we’ve seen from the EU. Intel rewarded OEMs to not use AMD’s processors through various means, such as volume discounts, withholding advertising & R&D money, and threatening OEMs with a low-priority during CPU shortages.

Intel reworked their compiler to put AMD CPUs at a disadvantage. For a time Intel’s compiler would not enable SSE/SSE2 codepaths on non-Intel CPUs, our assumption is that this is the specific complaint. To our knowledge this has been resolved for quite some time now.

Intel paid/coerced software and hardware vendors to not support or to limit their support for AMD CPUs. This includes having vendors label their wares as Intel compatible, but not AMD compatible.

False advertising. This includes hiding the compiler changes from developers, misrepresenting benchmark results (such as BAPCo Sysmark) that changed due to those compiler changes, and general misrepresentation of benchmarks as being “real world” when they are not.

These demonstrate only two recent examples of Intel getting reprimanded as a result of its anti-consumer practices. The scale of Intel’s operations and the amount of effort it put in to beating the market into submission goes further back than just a few years.

In the early 2000s when AMD’s Athlon 64 launched, which coincidentally was designed by Jim Keller the very same architect behind Ryzen, we witnessed Intel escalate its offense. Intel executives are on-record as referring to Dell as “the best friend money can buy” as well as openly acknowledging the use of rebates dubbed MCP — Meet Comp Program — to muscle OEMs into not dealing with AMD. Extremetech’s Joel Hruska goes into a good amount of detail about how this scheme was orchestrated to ensure the demise of OEMS that rebelled against Intel."